Dan Zarrella (HubSpot) – Stop Forcing and Tricking People Into Buying From You! (Taste of Technology Series Video)

On the occasion of the June 22 Taste of Technology Small Business Series, The Lies of Twitter and Facebook 3 experts in social media gathered to speak about how businesses can leverage the power of social media for their businesses.
Laura P. Thomas, Dell Global Small Business Creative Experience Team
Dan Zarrella, HubSpot Marketing Product Owner and Social Media Scientist
Brent Leary, CRM Essentials
In this next series of posts, we’ll bring you their presentations.
Here’s the video and below is the video summary/transcript:
(Ramon is opening the event and then Dan starts at abut 8:53 minutes into the video)

Ramon Ray, Editor and Technology Evangelist, Smallbiztechnology.com started the discussion.

Talking about technology these days it is impossible not to mention Social Media, but there are many lies and half-truths circulating about Social Media out there.
The most common false notion is that with Social Media participation success is guaranteed. Everybody uses Social Media, everybody has accounts on FaceBook and Twitter but what is the positive impact of that on the business development strategy of individual companies?
Almost none, Ramon said.

It is true that if used in the right way Social Media can be turned into a strategic asset for achieving growth, but it is also a fact that in many cases it can just be a waste of time.
For example why use Social Media if you don’t know how to offer great customer service to your customers? Why talk away on Twitter if you are not listening? How can we use these tools to energize our business. What are the problems for business owners and how can they be resolved. These are some of the questions that are going to be addressed on this edition of Taste of Technology – Small Business Series.

Hubspot has a new philosophy of marketing, a new paradigm with which to replace the obsolete outbound interruptive methods marketing has been reduced to in the past. Hubspot strives to create content that draws people to itself, that people actually want to see. As Mr. Zarrella puts it, in the new episode of Lost, a commercial does not interrupt the viewer. Instead, they have developed a software package that lets people create content around lost.
Today the audience can defend itself against the interruptive marketing. People have TiVo, they have sophisticated spam filters and they don’t allow access if they don’t recognize the source of the request. So they have to want to be exposed to marketing for a campaign to have a chance of success.
In the same time Marketing is still a coercion. You are trying to make people buy something from you, and even if you are not trying to trick them, you are still trying to manipulate them into doing something, so do not believe the people who tell you, you should love your customers and have a soft approach. It is a lie that Social Media is a giant group hug, Mr. Zarrella says.
Social Media is probably simply one of the most measurable forms of marketing that have happened in human history. We can finally look at what people are doing online and find out why they are doing it.
Today marketing is about getting ideas out there and giving them the power to spread around. An idea doesn’t succeed because it is funny or because it necessarily good it succeeds precisely because it is good at spreading around like in evolution.
When something is “viral” it has a strong pathogen – it is very contagious. Ideas are like viruses. If they have a reproductive rate less than 1 they will die out and be forgotten, but if their reproductive rate is happens to be higher than 1 they will spread around like an epidemic. The problem is that for an idea to have a reproductive rate of 1 is probably impossible. It would mean that every time you tell somebody your idea he is guaranteed to tell at least one person. This has never happened Mr. Zarrella says. But for an idea to have a reproductive rate of 0.1 is not bad at all. It means that if you Tweet it and you have 10 followers you will have at least one re-tweet. And if you give to a 1000 people or more, although it will die out eventually, many more people see it. So having a ton of followers makes it a lot easier to spread your content.Robert Cialdini wrote: The more people we see take a specific action, the more we think that action is correct.
If there are two empty restaurants, facing each other and somebody is really hungry, he will make a random choice and get in one of the restaurants. Let’s say restaurant A. The second person making the choice will be influenced by the decision the first person made, and before you know it the informational cascade will cause a line of people to form in front of restaurant A. The more followers you have, the more authoritative you will look even if you are not.